Message from our President & CTO, LJ Morris: NEW Year. NEW Features!

2020 was a year of highs and lows for everyone. Like most companies, SmartSearch had to adapt to remote working, enhanced safety procedures, and adapting to the new realities of 2020.

But what does not kill us makes us stronger. And I feel SmartSearch is now in the strongest position it has ever been as a business.

Despite the challenges of a global shutdown, 2020 was one of the most exciting years in SmartSearch’s 34-year history.

Highlights of 2020:
• The year’s big news was that our valued founder and CEO Doug Coull and our CFO Mike Estrada both retired. However, we were happy to announce that they remain on the Board of Directors and continue to provide us valuable expertise as we grow. We appreciate their years of leadership and guidance, and we wish them well in their next chapter as Members of the Board.
• I was honored to accept the role of President and CTO after 24 years with SmartSearch.
• We welcomed a new major shareholder and partner to the business, the Huddl3 Group. The Huddl3 Group brings some exciting support services and capital to the SmartSearch team, and we now have access to world-class services and support previously not available to us.
• Internally, we completed a move to our Scale VM platform, giving us some significant performance gains and additional redundancy and stability to the SmartSearch platform.
• We also added some new people and promoted some. Sam and Josh are our two newest members of the support team, and we also hired a new VP of Development, Farshad Farhand. Farshad brings us years of experience developing cutting-edge platforms from the ground-up and managing large teams of developers. We are also excited to announce that Debbie Sims was promoted to Director of Client Success and Colin Craig to Director of IT.

Where to in 2021:

2021 promises to be a year of exciting enhancements to SmartSearch. Our first-quarter goals include a move to the AWS platform. We are excited to move our services over to the most stable, robust network on the planet.

In addition, we will be rolling out our new ground-up redesign of all our portals. This will include employee/candidate portals and job search pages, manager portals, and VMS portal. We will also offer WordPress Widgets, allowing you to add ‘job search and apply’ functionality directly on your corporate WordPress site.

Later in the year, expect to hear more about SmartSearch Plus, our next generation SmartSearch product. Our development team is working its magic on the ground-up redesign of our flagship product. Performance, ease of use, and configurability are the guiding principles in this development process, and we are excited to share more as the year progresses.

Finally, we are happy to announce our new offices will be ready for us to occupy in early April. Covid-permitting, and we can’t wait to welcome visitors into our new create-space offices.

As we look forward to 2021, our sincerest wish for each of you is that this year is full of health, growth, and happiness; and we sincerely appreciate the honor of serving as your business partner and SaaS provider.